Honestly it sounds dumb, but a macbook pro with windows 7 would meet your needs best in my opinion. The problem is finding a PC that is "lightweight" for gaming. The macbook pro's have decent GPUs for gaming and game design. Otherwise toshiba/gateway usually offer one or two gaming computers in each of their lineups but they are very thick and very heavy with low battery life.

Hi, first off to clarify, gigabits are for measuring speed while gigabytes are for storage.

There are 2 types of memory you might be referring to, memory and hard drive.

Memory for what you describe I would recommend 3-4 gigabytes. The computer manages your memory and will use more if you have more so I cant say how much a gigabyte will hold.

Hard drive, you could get away with 160GB but I would recommend at least 250 Gigabytes if you store photos and music <--- so you have room to grow your collections. A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes and a typical music song is ~4 megabytes while a typical photo ranges from 2-6 Megabytes depending on your camera. So each gigabyte can hold either ~250 songs or photos. And expect a computer to use upto 20GB for a recovery partition, 12GB for windows 7 and ~10GB will just disappear because of how drives are formatted for windows.

That key on the bottom is the microsoft windows 7 key. There is no microsoft office key because computers only come with a trial for that program. You will need to purchase microsoft office 2007 OR switch to using microsoft works which should be included as a full version OR try "open office" a free alternative available online OR download the office 2010 beta which is good until some time in the fall this year.

The saying "you get what you pay for" goes strongly with computers. You may see a few offerings on laptops in the $350-$400 range, and they often wont cut it for a pleasant experience. For around $480-$550 you should be able to find a laptop well suited for high school. Take a look through the weekly ads as they come and in particular look for computers with a dual core processor - in particular I would recommend an Intel i3 for basic use or the Intel i5 if you have $600-700 to spend. The i5 is a processor with enough power to handle future applications which looks to be soon based on youtube and other websites moving to high definition content. The sub $400 laptops usually have single core processors and really struggle to do the simple tasks such as browsing the internet while working on a document or playing music while doing homework.